It may not be the most scientific of surveys (article here), but I’m happy to accept its findings. That much respected and well-established bastion of the Japanese web community, EigoTown, has just published the results of a survey showing that the Japanese find British English the sexiest of all English accents. That’s jolly good news for all those owning such an accent.

Results in order of sexiness:
Brit Eng: 50%
Am Eng: 16%
Irish Eng: 13%
Can Eng: 12%
Aus Eng: 5%
NZ Eng: 4%

South African English obviously wasn’t considered English-sounding enough to be included.

I thought it best to put the results of the survey to the test, just in case they were a load of tosh.

So I lined up three blokes in a bar. An Englishman, an Australian and an American. I then brought in a Japanese office lady and asked her to listen to each of them read out three statements, constructed in a way so as to avoid any bias that might tarnish the validity of the results. She then had to simply place her right hand upon the left shouder of the person whose accent she found the sexiest and say the words, "Wow, my knees are weak with excitement."

The three statements were:
1. “A cup of tea is a particularly nice thing to have at four o’clock in the afternoon.”
2. “London is a rather foggy place this time of year.”
3. “Cor blimey darlin’, you got a luvly Barnet; but I don’t care much for yer Hampstead Heath. Careful now luv, cos one more pig’s ear and I’m gonna Wallace & Gromit all over your larvely new dress.”

The Japanese woman, even after being Wallace & Gromitted over by the Englishman, preferred his accent to the other two. So there you have it. Conclusive results.

By the way, a guide to speaking British English can be found here.

It’s hard to photograph an accent so I put up a picture of these towels instead.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 09, 2006 at 10:11 am. You can skip to the end and leave a response.